Study: Cloud, data center traffic will continue growing exponentially

Wednesday, November 30, 2011 - 1:00pm

According to Cisco's Global Cloud Index, which tracks cloud computing and virtualization trends, worldwide data center IP traffic will increase exponentially over the next several years, eventually reaching 4.8 zettabytes by the end of 2015.

As a result, the number of processes in the cloud will increase dramatically over the same time period, accounting for more than 50 percent of all workloads by 2014. Additionally, Cisco's research revealed that global cloud traffic will expand twelvefold through 2015, increasing at a compound annual growth rate of 66 percent.

As both consumers and businesses increase their adoption of the cloud, penetration of the technology within overall data center traffic will grow proportionately. By 2015, 19 percent of all business data center traffic and 37 percent of all consumer data center traffic will be cloud-based, Cisco noted.

Much of the growing adoption of the cloud will be due to the deployment of Infrastructure-as-a-Service whose market, according to Gartner Research, will grow from $3.7 billion in 2011 to $10.5 billion in 2014.